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WOM and Buzz marketing campaigns are soon to change. As we wrote in a previous piece, Google is leveraging its enormous user base to give WOM and Buzz marketing a new spin— by selling users’ endorsements of different products.

Obviously, this helps the bottom lines of and on the one side, and marketers on the other side.

But what is in it for users who write the endorsement? Should they be rewarded?

Readers to the previous post gave a mixed response. “Users are rewarded through a mutually advantageous access to the opinions of people that they trust enough to include in one or more of their g+ Circles,” wrote one reader.“Promiscuous gossip girls get the advice they asked for as well as those belonging to standards committees or buying cooperatives. The value of what they share is proportional to the quality of the advice and advisors in their circles.”

Google owes people no recompense for their image. It’s just on the screen for speeding up the recognition of the source by those they advise.”

“Absolutely,” wrote another reader. “I am prepared to unfollow the branded pages I currently follow because I may now be an unpaid endorser, something I avoided by choosing to not -- or review anything branded, the same as I do for Facebook.”

“This is amazing,” wrote a third reader. “I always wondered why it took so long for Google to do this." It will be interesting to see if Google will reward users to promote their endorsements (but that means that endorsements might become biased, and then companies can hire people to get more endorsements). Wom.me is one way to get people to endorse by involving them online.

That’s actually the crux of the problem. WOM and buzz campaigns involve a great deal of trust. Consumers tend to trust other consumers who have nothing to gain by promoting a product, more than they do professional marketers, who have everything to gain by promoting the product.

This is especially the case with information received from people we know or talk to directly, e.g., relatives, friends and coworkers.

Consumers tend to believe that information from sources like these is more reliable and trustworthy than information received through the media.

Wouldn’t this trust be compromised when endorsers get compensated?

It depends how endorsers get compensated. An outright monetary reward would certainly undermine the credibility of the endorsement. A compensation scheme in the form of a coupon discount that kicks in once the product achieves a certain sales benchmark could encourage more users to write product endorsements without compromising credibility—consumers won’t spend time endorsing products they don’t really believe in.

Are users, for instance, to write rave reviews for the purpose of receiving discounts for restaurants they don’t really like? I don’t think so, as they will end up receiving useless discounts.

But wait a minute? Isn’t that what is doing? Very close, but with one difference. Groupon’s user base, resources, and relations with marketers are no match for Google’s and Facebook’s. This means that Google and Facebook product campaigns stand better chances of reaching critical sales thresholds than Groupon campaigns.